The Gift of Sight
by 94 Bottles Of Snapple
Summary: Post-999, pre-VLR. Spoilers for the 999 True End. Gentarou Hongou curses his fate, makes a deal, sees a star, and possibly finds the sort of peace he's been looking for.


**A/N: This isn't all that great, but Zero Escape needs more fanfiction. Also, I just wanted to see these two interact, since they obviously had to at some point.**

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Gentarou Hongou is a man of science. He doesn't believe in their cult, this Free the Soul, because he doesn't believe in anything. But he played along, played his part, to get the money he needed for his Nonary Project. And it's all been for nothing. Because he cannot differentiate the face of the woman walking towards him from the face of any of the others who have come to interrogate him. He recognizes her voice, though.

"Hongou."

"Alice," he answers mildly, gallantly. "A pleasure to speak with you again."

All he does is speak with people. Her build reminds him of Lotus, and so does her stance. He wonders how their faces are different, how they would be different if he could only tell. She rolls her eyes and he pretends not to notice. It's a game.

"I'm not leaving until you tell me something that's actually useful in tracking them down."

Them being Free the Soul, of course. She begins with an ultimatum. Poetic. He likes that. But that information is his only leverage. Alice is probably too young for him, he thinks all of a sudden, drawn to the way her hand rests on her hip, which is popped to the side in irritation. Most women are too young for him, honestly. But an old man can dream, especially when there isn't much else to do.

"We are going to be here a long time, I believe," he tells her, leaning back in his chair comfortably as if he's still in charge.

He fantasizes about looking at her face and seeing something unique about it. She is a unique woman. But nothing can supersede his prosopagnosia, damned as he is. Alice smacks her hands on the table, but she doesn't seem truly angry. Mildly frustrated, yes, but they all are. Even him. But not for the same reasons. Never for the same reasons, because he only cares about his own problems. And why shouldn't he? When everything else fails, Hongou's fantasies often become violent.

Akane Kurashiki's smoldering ashes. Shoving Snake – not Snake, Nijisaki – through the Number 3 door to explode into a pile of guts and a mist of blood. The feel of cold metal in his hand, pressing the gun to Lotus's head. He wants to break Alice open and see inside her. He wants to end this woman with the same face as all the others, the same face as everyone else on the godforsaken planet, why does she have that face? Like looking into the face of a mulish animal. How can anyone be told apart? Why can't he read the differences mapped on their faces? How can he be expected to see anyone as human, treat anyone as human, when they all look like monkeys in a zoo? He tells himself it's not his fault that he wants to break inside her and make her fear him.

His frustration is likely palpable. Akane Kurashiki had lived. Akane Kurashiki had tapped into the morphogenetic fields. The Nonary Project was a success, and yet here he sits, unable to break his own curse. Why had they done this to him? All of them. All of them had done this to him, if they had just let him study their esper abilities, he knew he would have been able to figure it out.

It's like she can read his mind.

"We have espers on our team. We can have them attempt to send you the images of faces. But you'll have to cooperate."

She sounds so very sure of herself. Confident. Strong. Professional. Gentarou Hongou had been all of those things once.

He agrees.

He tells them everything he can think of about Free the Soul. He has no loyalties there, and he just wants to talk. To get it all off his chest. No longer stemmed in by the duct tape Junpei had so rudely _provided_ him with. To be perfectly honest, it isn't much. But it must be somehow enough, since the SOIS is satisfied. Satisfied enough that they don't break their deal. Alice brings him the good news. She is the only one he will talk to anymore.

"I want to see your face first," he tells her. "Make them show me your face first."

She doesn't object to his condition, and doesn't ask why. He thinks that's part of the game they've been playing too. He's steadily become more and more overtly reliant on her, and she acts like nothing has changed. Just an agent and her prisoner. The espers try. It takes days to make them attuned to one another, to have enough of them channeling the image towards him so that even he can pick it up, but eventually…

A miracle occurs.

There she is. That is Alice. And her features have been neatly dissected, slotted and categorized for him. Bite-sized pieces of information that his brain is at last, at last able to assemble into a face. A unique face. The only face Gentarou Hongou has ever seen, and god is she beautiful. He doesn't even realize he's crying until Alice flicks a handkerchief at him and tells him to "wipe that shit off his face" and calls him a weepy old man.

"I know I'm unbelievably gorgeous," she says. "But that's no excuse to start sobbing."

So he laughs instead. And when he's finally wiped all the tears away, he can still see her face. He can _see_ it. The espers are no longer channeling, but his brain can pick out her features just fine. It's managed to remember that much. She's like a star. The only human face in a world full of monkeys.

"Alice, dear," he says to her softly, "you're beautiful."

"I know," she scoffs back, and her lips are full and frowning, and her eyes are skeptical but bright, and he could love her just for this.


End file.
